Journal of Early Christian Studies

Brent Nongbri would like scholars to be much more self-conscious about the term “religion”: that it is properly a second-order “redescriptive” category and in no way should be imagined as a translation of some indigenous concept, since no culture outside of Protestant Christianity has ever had such a concept as our “religion.” The book consists of a series of short chapters examining moments and cases in the misapprehension of indigenous terms linked to our word “religion,” from early Christian heresiography to nineteenth-century orientalist scholarship. “Religion,” he argues, is so tainted with Protestant baggage that it should really be [End Page 632] replaced with more pertinent and culturally particular amalgamations of cultural dynamics, like “ancestral tradition” or “scribal praxis” (159).

At one level this is a familiar, even obvious argument: that “religion”—like “faith” or “salvation” or “superstition”—carries particular theological assumptions that have the capacity to distort the materials, texts, or ideas under discussion. Graduate students in Religious Studies (if not those in History, Classics, or Patristics) tend to be sensitized to the Protestant undercurrents in our critical terminology and even in our areas of study. Nongbri takes the point much further in this book, arguing that scholars must not use any critical term that the culture does not itself share in some way conceptually (e.g., 23), an argument that seriously misunderstands the nature of the second-order category as heuristic, “the creation of the scholar’s study” as J. Z. Smith famously declared of “religion” (Imagining Religion [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], xi). And yet, his argument does extend to “religion” the kind of censure some of us have sought to level at “paganism” (which intrinsically distorts its subject), “magic” (which reifies a Protestant alterity of ritual practice), or “sacrifice” (which imagines common offering practices as bloody animal-slaughter). The interpretation of religion or religious phenomena inevitably requires such regular adjustments of terminology to avoid theological bias or cultural distortion, to facilitate critical inquiry and comparison, and to motivate productive conversation. That is to say, on Nongbri’s side, we are responsible for self-conscious scrutiny and for debate about the utility, excesses, and proper senses of the terminology we use.

However, there is something naive in Nongbri’s argument about the disposability of “religion.” For one thing, as he briefly notes in his Conclusion (157), the same denunciations of post-Enlightenment, even colonialist categories could be marshalled against “culture” and “ethnicity,” as well—I would add—as “art,” “literature,” “sexuality,” “gender,” and even “representation.” None of these categories bears much, if any, relationship to any people’s indigenous classifications, but they all help us to frame in comparative terms important historical or anthropological discussions. The problem that I have with categories like “magic” and “pagan” is not whether ancient cultures had first-order equivalences but whether the terms productively select out phenomena for comparison and interpretation. Do they bear actual definitions, or do they function as casual shorthands, and when does the casual shorthand turn into thoroughgoing historiographical distortion? These are quite specific criteria; the expectation that a term might accurately or even distantly reflect indigenous concepts strikes me as a misunderstanding of what critical categories are supposed to do.

“Religion” can certainly sustain a strong definition; but here, most lamentably, Nongbri loads the dice in his depiction of modern scholarly uses and definitions of the word. The “classic” authors he discusses consist of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, William James, and Rudolf Otto, with a brief nod to Paul Tillich (155) and an extensive quotation from Karen Armstrong; while two stronger, more contemporary theorists, Bruce Lincoln and Benson Saler, are cited for brief dismissal. Nowhere is Émile Durkheim even mentioned, nor Bronislaw Malinowski, nor Max Weber, all by far the most important influences on the [End Page 633] contemporary study of ancient religion, with the most distinctively second-order conceptualizations of “religion” in the history of modern scholarship. How Nongbri could ignore these latter figures in favor of this parade of distinctly Protestant thinkers is astounding but certainly plays conveniently to Nongbri’s point about an irremediable Protestant bias in the use of “religion.” It does not, however, represent the academy of scholars of ancient religion, especially those in France and England, who tend to begin from a strong basis in the Durkheimian social anthropological tradition. That is to say, when they use “religion” to discuss ancient Roman phenomena, they do not pretend to translate indigenous concepts but rather use it as a lens to see dynamic performative and conceptual features of culture (Cf. M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]), and John Scheid, La religion des Romains [Paris: Armand Colin, 1998]). Nongbri’s images of scholars at work, however, come from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

I might finally add that Nongbri glosses over some historical data that might have stimulated a quite different, more positive book. The prophet Mani, for example, did not produce a “religion” in the Protestant or Geertzian sense (62–72), yet some analogous category might be used to describe the Manichaean concept of culmination of prior systems with prophets, teachings, and books. A comprehensive notion of “religion” (carefully defined) might indeed serve to frame Mani’s distinctive system; it was not simply a hybrid of third-century Christian writings. Likewise, though Japanese Shinto was, as Nongbri asserts, politically reinvented in modern Japan along western lines of “religion,” the very development of a Shin-to in the sixth century c.e. as a system corresponding to Butsu-do (“the way of the Buddha”) represents in many respects a conceptualization of “religion” along the lines that Buddhism itself presented. The point is that even if we scholars are left to our own devices to describe the “religious” systems or coherences of ancient cultures, occasionally in history a subculture will conceptualize its own system: a combination of books and experts, authoritative lineages, and ritual and material traditions. And “religion,” in the particular sense of, say, a globalizing framework for such elements, may indeed be an apt description for that indigenous or idiosyncratic systematization. Indeed, we can see such conceptualizations of religious system in images of the Other and his perverse rites and habits that have been generated for centuries in the fantasies of local communities (see my “Religion in the Mirror of the Other” in Dans le laboratoire de l’historien des religions, ed. F. Prescendi and Y. Volokhine [Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2011], 74–90). I suspect Nongbri would be open to such critical, comparative adjustments to the category “religion.” But his book largely forecloses effective and theoretically-informed rectifications of the term. [End Page 634]